[blueyes]

One of the main advantages Anthropic currently has over Google is the tooling that comes with Claude Code. It may not generate better code, and it has a lower complexity ceiling, but it can automatically find and search files, and figure out how to fix a syntax error fast.

[bayarearefugee]

As another person that cancelled my Claude and switched to Gemini, I agree that Claude Code is very nice, but beyond some initial exploration I never felt comfortable using it for real work because Claude 3.7 is far too eager to overengineer half-baked solutions that extend far beyond what you asked it to do in the first place.

Paying real API money for Claude to jump the gun on solutions invalidated the advantage of having a tool as nice as Claude Code, at least for me, I admit everyone's mileage will vary.

[neuah]

Exactly my experience as well. Started out loving it but it almost moves too fast - building in functionality that i might want eventually but isn't yet appropriate for where the project is in terms of testing, or is just in completely the wrong place in the architecture. I try to give very direct and specific prompts but it still has the tendency to overreach. Of course it's likely that with more use i will learn better how to rein it in.

[Hugsun]

I've experienced this a lot as well. I also just yesterday had an interesting argument with claude.

It put an expensive API call inside a useEffect hook. I wanted the call elsewhere and it fought me on it pretty aggressively. Instead of removing the call, it started changing comments and function names to say that the call was just loading already fetched data from a cache (which was not true). I could not find a way to tell it to remove that API call from the useEffect hook, It just wrote more and more motivated excuses in the surrounding comments. It would have been very funny if it weren't so expensive.

[freedomben]

Geez, I'm not one of the people who think AI is going to wake up and wipe us out, but experiences like yours do give me pause. Right now the AI isn't in the drivers seat and can only assert itself through verbal expression, but I know it's only a matter of time. We already saw Cursor themselves get a taste of this. To be clear I'm not suggesting the AI is sentient and malicious - I don't believe that at all. I think it's been trained/programmed/tuned to do this, though not intentionally, but the nature of these tools is they will surprise us

[Jensson]

> but the nature of these tools is they will surprise us

Models used to do this much much more than now, so what it did doesn't surprise us.

The nature of these tools is to copy what we have already written. It has seen many threads where developers argue and dig in, they try to train the AI not to do that but sometimes it still happens and then it just roleplays as the developer that refuses to listen to anything you say.

[elcritch]

I almost fear more that we'll create Bender from Futurama than some superintelligent enlightened AGI. It'll probably happen after Grok AI gets snuck some beer into its core cluster or something absurd.

[arrowsmith]

> We already saw Cursor themselves get a taste of this.

Sorry what do you mean by this?

[tempoponet]

Earlier this week a Cursor AI support agent told a user they could only use Cursor on one machine at a time, causing the user to cancel their subscription.

[davem007]

agreed, no matter what prompt I try, including asking Claude to promise not to implement code unless we agree on requirements and design, and to repeat that promise regularly, it jumps the gun, and implements (actually hallucinates) solutions way to soon. I changed to Gemini as a result.

[roygbiv2]

I wanted some powershell code to do some sharepoint uploading. It created a 1000 line logging module that allowed me to log things at different levels like info, debug, error etc. Not really what I wanted.

[tough]

Open Codex (A codex fork) that supports gemini and openrouter providers https://github.com/ymichael/open-codex

google models on cli are great.

[mark_l_watson]

+1 Open Codex is very nice. Yesterday I was using it with Gemini APIs and also using a local model using Ollama running on my laptop.

I added a very short chapter on setting this up (direct link to my book online): https://leanpub.com/ollama/read#using-the-open-codex-command...

This morning I tweaked my Open Codex config to also try gemma3:27b-it-qat - and Google’s olen source small is excellent: runs fast enough for a good dev experience, with very good functionality.

[btbuildem]

"Don't be a keener. Do not do anything I did not ask you to do" are def part of my prompts when using Claude

[Sonnigeszeug]

Whats your setup/workflow then?

Any ide integration?

[igor47]

I've switched to aider with the --watch-files flag. Being able to use models in nvim with no additional tooling is pretty sweet

[aitchnyu]

Typing `//use this as reference ai` in one file and `//copy this row to x ai!` and it will add those functions/files to context and act on both places. Altough I wish Aider would write `working on your request...` under my comment, now I have to keep Aider window in sight. Autocomplete and "add to context" and "enter your instructions" of other apps feel clunky.

[mediaman]

That's really cool. I've been looking for a nicer solution to use with nvim.

[mrinterweb]

I don't understand the appeal of investing in leaning and adapting your workflow to use an AI tool that is so tightly coupled to a single LLM provider, when there are other great AI tools available that are not locked to a single LLM provider. I would guess aider is the closest thing to claude code, but you can use pretty much any LLM.

The LLM field is moving so fast that what is the leading frontier model today, may not be the same tomorrow.

Pricing is another important consideration. https://aider.chat/docs/leaderboards/

[smallnamespace]

All the AI tools end up converging on a similar workflow: type what you want and interrupt if you're not getting what you want.

[vladmdgolam]

There are at least 10 projects currently aiming to recreate Claude Code, but for Gemini. For example, geminicodes.co by NotebookLM’s founding PM Raiza Martin

[wcallahan]

Tried Gemini Codes yesterday, as well as anon-kode and anon-codex. Gemini Codes is already broken and appears to be rather brittle (she disclosures as much), and the other two appear to still need some prompt improvements or someone adding vector embedding for them to be useful?

Perhaps someone can merge the best of Aider and codex/claude code now. Looking forward to it.

[energy123]

Google need to fix their Gemini web app at a basic level. It's slow, gets stuck on Show Thinking, rejects 200k token prompts that are sent one shot. Aistudio is in much better shape.

[Graphon1]

But have you tried any other interfaces for Gemini? Like the Gemini Code Assistant in VSCode? Or Gemini-backed Aider?

[roygbiv2]

Have you tried them? Which one is fairly simple but just works?

[shrisukhani]

+1 on this. Improving Gemini apps and live mode will go such a long way for them. Google actually has the best model line-up now but the apps and APIs hold them back so much.

[johnisgood]

I hate how I can copy paste long text into Claude (becomes a pasted text) and it is accepted, but in Gemini it is limited.

[Workaccount2]

You can paste it in a text file and upload that. A little annoying compared to claude, but does work.

[johnisgood]

Thanks, will give it a try.

[xbmcuser]

Uploading files on google is now great. I uploaded my python script and the text data files I was using the script to process. I asked it how best to optimize the code. It actually ran the python code on the data files. Then recommended changes then when prompted ran the script again to show the new results. At first I was like maybe hallucinating but no the data was correct.

[johnisgood]

Yeah "they" run Python code now quite well. They generate some output using Python "internally" (albeit shows you the code).

[mogili]

I use roo code with Gemini to get similar results for free

[ssd532]

Does its agentic features work with any API? I had tried this or Cline and it was clear that they work effectively only with Claude's tooling support.

[piizeus]

Yes. Any API Key is allowed, Also you can assign different LLMs for different modes. It is great for cost-optimization. Like architect, code, ask, debug etc.

[julianeon]

Related:

Only Claude (to my knowledge) has a desktop app which can directly, and usually quite intelligently, modify files and create repos on your desktop. It's the only "agentic" option among the major players.

"Claude, make me an app which will accept Stripe payments and sell an ebook about coding in Python; first create the app, then the ebook."

It would take a few passes but Claude could do this; obviously you can't do that with an API alone. That capability alone is worth $30/month in my opinion.

[xvinci]

Maybe I am not understanding something here.

But there are third party options availabe that to the very same thing (e.g. https://aider.chat/ ) which allow you to plug in a model (or even a combination thereof e.g. deepseek as architect and claude as code writer) of your choice.

Therefore the advantage of the model provider providing such a thing doesn't matter, no?

[jm547ster]

Aider is not agentic - it is interactive by design. Copilot agent mode and Cline would better comparisons.

[tough]

OpenAI launched codex 2 days ago, there's open forks already that support other providers too

there's also claude code proxy's to run it on local llm's

you can just do things

[int_19h]

A first party app, sure, but there's no shortage of third party options. Cursor, Windsurf/Codeium etc. Even VSCode has agent mode now.

[dingnuts]

> first create the app, then the ebook."

> It would take a few passes but Claude could do this;

I'm sorry but absolutely nothing I've seen from using Claude indicates that you could give it a vague prompt like that and have it actually produce anything worth reading.

Can it output a book's worth of bullshit with that prompt? Yes. But if you think "write a book about Python" is where we are in the state of the art in language models in terms of the prompt you need to get a coherent product, I want some of whatever you are smoking because that has got to be the good shit

[indexerror]

OpenAI just released Codex, which is basically the same as Claude Code.

[hiciu]

It looks the same, but for some reason Claude Code is much more capable. Codex got lost in my source code and hallucinated bunch of stuff, Claude on the same task just went to town, burned money and delivered.

Of course, this is only my experience and codex is still very young. I really hope it becomes as capable as Claude.

[rockwotj]

Part of it is probably tgat claude is just better at coding than what openai has available. I am considering trying to hack in support for gemini into codex and play around with it.

[lytedev]

I was doing this last night with open-codex, a fork. https://github.com/ymichael/open-codex

[thrdbndndn]

Copilot agent mode?

[WiSaGaN]

Also the "project" feature in claude improves experience significantly for coder, where you can customize your workflow. Would be great if gemini has this feature.

[mdhb]

Firebase Studio is the Google equivalent